If any coach knows what it takes to emerge victorious from the National Lacrosse League wars, Chris Hall would be the guy. He’s taken two different teams to the pinnacle of the league, winning championships in Calgary in 2004 and in Washington in 2010, so when the man opines on being successful at this time of the year, others listen.

“Over the course of the season you know there’s going to be high and lows, especially this year with the closeness of the league,” offered Hall, whose Washington Stealth travel to the Scotiabank Saddledome on Saturday to contest the NLL West Division final against the Calgary Roughnecks. Game time is 4:30 p.m.

“You have to manage your peaking points through the course of the year and also assess your personnel and your player combinations, the structure of your team. Hopefully, you’re injury free and you’ve made all your decisions around strategies and personnel so that when the playoffs start you’re in a peaking mode. Fortunately, we seem to be in the right place right now. Then you still need a sprinkle of luck along the way, but you hope everything fires hot.”

The Stealth made it into the final by defeating the Rush 12-11 in Edmonton last Saturday, despite falling behind 7-2 at the half. When asked about the importance of a good start against Calgary, Hall couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Given last week’s performance, it’s really not very important at all,” he said. “As much as everyone wants to get off to a good start, everyone also wants to play well in the middle and play well at the end. Things happen in the course of games and you try your best to be playing at your peak for the whole 60 minutes. Our last game was evidence of that. You can want to get off to a good start, but if you don’t, you can’t call it a day. You have to dig in and try to turn the tide around a little bit.”

On the other side of the floor is first-year head man Curt Malawsky, who may not have Hall’s resumé behind the bench, but who has played in enough big games to also know the drill.

“Obviously playoff time, goaltending and special teams will be very big but from our perspective it’ll be discipline,” Malawsky noted. “We’ve been very good lately with staying out of the penalty box and we’ll continue to control the things we can control. (Against Edmonton) they had four power-play goals which addresses the discipline side and they had four transition goals and four five-on-five goals — so that’s almost a perfect NLL game in my perspective.”

The winners of this game know that they will host the Champions’ Cup, as the highest remaining seeds. No doubt the Roughnecks are hoping for a big crowd this weekend to urge them on to that final rung.

“That just adds to the excitement of the whole playoffs; going into Calgary, that rink, it’s a lot of fun going in there,” said Washington defender Kyle Sorensen. “You get the fans yelling at you . . . “It seems we do this every year, we have to go through this battle. We know how good they are, from the goaltending out. They have good coaching and obviously their offence is one of the top in the league. We just have to go out and play within the lines and focus on who’s in our dressing room and play well for a full 60 minutes because if you’re down 7-2 to this team this weekend, we’re going to have our hands full again.”